Romanian men jailed for role in credit card fraud

Two Romanian men have been jailed for 16 months for their roles in duplicating credit cards as part of an international fraud operation.

Gardaí with a search warrant burst in on Adrian Melencu (aged 28) as he sat in his living room copying credit cards with a laptop and card-reader, or skimmer, while Eduard Cosgarea (aged 38) was found upstairs with a fake Italian driving license.

The men, with an address at Bayview Lawns, Killiney, Dublin, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to possessing the individual items they were caught with as well as four counts each of possessing fake bank and Visa cards at their home on February 26, 2009.

Judge Martin Nolan backdated the sentence to February 2009, when they entered custody, after he had established the men wished to return to Romania on their release.

He said he was “pleasantly surprised” to discover neither man had any previous convictions in Ireland or Romania.

Detective Garda Sonya Skelly told Mr Dominic McGinn BL, prosecuting, others higher up in the operation would have provided Menlencu with credit and bank card information from various sources in a notebook and he was paid to feed this information via computer into the card-reader.

Det Gda Skelly said more people, including Cosgarea, would have used the cards to buy high end goods like cameras or mobile phones which were then resold.

She agreed with Mr Tony McGillicuddy BL, defending Menlencu, that his client had arrived in Ireland a short time before the offence, that he had taken some casual work in restaurants but then got involved in the fraud when his savings started to run out.

She agreed with Mr McGillicuddy and Mr Dean Kelly BL, for Cosgarea, that both men had received no family visits during the 14 months they had been in jail awaiting sentence.